A deep dive: The Southern Resident Killer Whales

Sierra Simpson, Michael Panes / January 11, 2019

74

Southern Resident Killer Whales remaining

For years the orca was known as a nuisance. A sea predator that would take the precious chinook salmon away from fishermen, resulting in harpoon attacks and shootings of these mysterious creatures. However, times have changed and these whales, with their distinctive black-and-white marks have become synonymous with the Pacific Northwest.

As of 2005, the orca pod known as the Southern Residence Killer Whale’s have landed on the Endangered Species Act. The clan, consisting of three unique lineages; J, K, L, have a population of 74, the lowest population mark in over 30 years, a result of the years of captivity, hunting, and ignorance by man in the past.

“Before we started taking them for capture, fisherman were shooting them because they were eating salmon. So we wiped out who knows how many, shooting orcas out of fear, sport and anger because they were eating the same fish that fishermen were going out to catch. Then we took roughly 50 out of a very small population, and these were pretty much all babies, and put them into tanks. We owe them.“

Mark Leireth-YoungAuthor, Director, The Hundred Year Old Orca

The chinook salmon shortages

“This region was once famous for not just the gigantic runs of chinook salmon but gigantic chinook salmon – up to 100 pounds, and those days are gone, were looking at an ecosystem that’s just a shadow of what it once was.”

Jason ColbyEnvironmental History Professor, UVIC, Author

The southern resident orcas have a diet of just one dish, chinook salmon. With recent reports from the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife In Canada stating that nearly half of southern British Columbia’s chinook salmon populations are in decline, it has put a stress on the killer whale’s main source of food.

What has caused this shortage of salmon? The emergence of commercial fishing alongside the development of the surrounding areas around the Fraser River that have led to drastic climate change is what Jason Colby, Environmental professor and author of Orca: How We Came to Know and Love the Ocean’s Greatest Predator believes to be the culprits.

“Ultimately this is a story of starvation, this is a story about this shrinking population [where] even its current numbers can’t manage to feed itself on the prey that was once super abundant,” said Colby.

With climate change altering the temperature in the water, it has only added to the number of problems the chinook salmon are facing. The growing number of sea lions hunting the salmon, as well as the increased toxicity and acidity in the ocean is what some experts believe to be the reasons for the decline.

But Colby still points to one of the big reasons he believes the numbers are down; fishing.

“How much are people willing to restrict fishing because despite the fact that [the orcas are] starving, there’s still commercial fishing continuing on the US and Canadian side – there’s still sport fishing that takes out thousands of chinook salmon a year,” asks Colby.

With the southern resident killer whale’s being a bi-national population – crossing borders, travelling along Vancouver Island all the way down to Washington State, Colby says it is hard to regulate due to the need for cross-border regulations, but is necessary for the survival and growth of the chinook salmon.

The Trans Mountain pipeline

“There’s something really wrong with the ecosystem of the Salish Sea because this apex predator is dying right in front of us.”

During the summer, you can find the southern resident killer whale pod to be in Canadian waters, swimming through the Salish Sea. But once the temperature drops, and the winter months come, the orca’s make their way down south towards the Puget Sound and even all the way down to Northern California, which is what makes inputting regulations a tough job on government officials.

“They draw upon resources on both sides [of the border] and generally speaking the Canadian officials – which may be surprising to some Canadians – have been much slower to recognize the danger and move to protect the southern resident killer whales than the US side has,” says Colby. “Washington has formed an emergency task force, governors have urged everything from restrictions on fishing to dam removal and calling on billions of dollars to support this emergency and this kind of policy hasn’t been forthcoming from the Canadian side.”

Despite the threats to the safety of not just the southern resident killer whales, but to the rest of the ecosystem, the Canadian government has taken the reigns on the Trans Mountain Pipeline to ensure its completion, which has Mark Leiren-Young, author and director for The Hundred Year Old Whale, concerned about the future of the southern resident killer whales.

With the population of the southern resident killer whales at a thirty year low, experts worry that adding the pipeline into the equation may just be the straw that breaks the camels back. With the Trans Mountain Pipeline in mind, Colby is quick to mention the population of mammal eating killer whales in Prince William Sound, near Alaska that has been on its way to inevitable extinction due to the pod no longer having any reproductive females.

“They’re basically just waiting to die out, and that was all caused by an oil spill – which is one of the big concerns of the Trans Mountain Pipeline – is that when you have a population on the edge of the knife of extinction, if you put anymore strains on them we can put them on the final road to that,” says Colby.

“Once you have populations that fall to a certain level, their ability to re-spawn, their ability to recover even in ideal conditions really becomes limited.”

A call to action

“Southern resident killer whales echolocate to find food, so you can imagine that if there’s a lot of noise – just like being in a bar – its hard to hear when your echo comes back, so at some point you stop making your echolocation noise because you just can’t hear the echos. So you stop talking.”

Ruth JoyBiostatistician, Sea Mammal Research Unit

Although at times the Southern Resident Killer Whales’ chances of survival are meek, small steps have begun to stabilize their environment. Ruth Joy, biostatistician for the Sea Mammal Research Unit has been working with Vancouver’s Pilot’s Authority to lower noise emission from vessels coming into the port of Vancouver as well as through the Haro Strait, a known foraging location for the Southern Resident Killer Whales. Busier waters mean more noise, leading to orcas having trouble communicating through echolocation and finding their food. Currently sixty percent of vessels have taken part in the ‘slow down’ program that has been in place for the past two summers.

“[The slow trails] have had reductions of around 20% in the noise emission from these vessels and it’s thought that if we can get it up to 100% [of vessels] it would be about 40% reduction in the noise overall,” says Joy.

But the big issue still lies in the lack of chinook salmon. The southern residence killer whales focus on the Puget Sound in the Salish Sea for their chinook salmon, but once winter comes they move south to the Northern California coast, where the chinook salmon population has completely collapsed.

Southern Resident Killer Whale population. (Sierra Simpson/BCIT News)

“Chinook is the number one thing we should be focusing on, there’s been a collapse not just in the Fraser but other fish bearing streams in the Salish Sea. So the Coquitlam River and down into Puget Sound have suffered reductions in the size and numbers returning,” Joy says.

Beyond the slow trails, Joy says the SMRU are looking at possible rehabilitation opportunities in the Fraser River and the other fish bearing streams that provide chinook salmon to the Southern Resident Killer Whales.

Wake up call

“We love them, we tell ourselves we love them but at the same time our choices are starving them and poisoning them and that’s a hard reality.”

Jason ColbyEnvironmental History Professor, UVIC, Author

With recent reports of two more Southern Resident Killer Whales set to die from starvation by the summer of 2019, a call for action and change feels needed. The Southern Resident Killer Whales are a part of the fabric of British Columbia and its surrounding regions. Orcas have shaped the ecosystem we now inhibit, and are a part of stories that we have heard for generations, and all signs point to the need for significant changes to be made in order to ensure that future generations will continue to be able to tell their story.

“They helped transform us and in a lot of ways I think we owe them the debt that means doing everything we can to make sure they can live amongst us and not pass away.”- Jason Colby